An interview with the author
The interview was done in person, in the studio of Millard Pertlin located somewhere east of the Pecos but not west of Barstow.
Interview with the Author, by Millard of Dervish Press
Millard of Dervish Press: So you say your latest story you’re working on “isn’t really about anything”. No post-modern person with their finger on the pulse of pop culture and even the most rudimentary education in recent history can fail to note the linkage there—
Author: —to Seinfeld.
Millard of Dervish Press: Exactly.
Author: Well, I’ll tell you, did you notice something about that show—now I don’t know about you, but I was a big fan and basically watched every episode through all its, what, 8? 9 seasons…?
Millard of Dervish Press: Yep, nine. 1989 to 1999. Same here, a religious watcher, wouldn’t miss an episode, even if I had to tape it and watch it later. So you were saying…?
Author: Did you notice how even though, as we say, they made a big deal about how the show is “about nothing”, in fact, it turned out to be a lot about something—a whole lot of somethings, each week! Each episode in fact, was chock full of somethings!
Millard of Dervish Press: You’re right, I did notice that, come to think of it…
Author: So I’ve thought a lot about that concept, and when I first heard it, I was entranced. Of course, I didn’t mind when Seinfeld pretty much betrayed the principle, because it was so damned entertaining; but still, in the back of my mind I thought, what if…?
Millard of Dervish Press: What if a show were really, literally about nothing…
Author: Precisely.
Millard of Dervish Press: And what would it look like, then…?
Author: Well, I’m still not sure [laughs]. My forte, as you know, is not television or movies, as I’m exclusively a fiction writer. So my interest in this has been to see if I could write a story “about nothing”.
Millard of Dervish Press: Have you succeeded yet?
Author: First off, maybe I should point out the obvious—namely, that a story couldn’t actually be about nothing, since there would be literally no content: blank pages. Not just the idea of blank pages, but actual blank pages, with no typing on them!
Millard of Dervish Press: Okay, so if you have to put stuff down on paper, how do you do that and still avoid writing about something…?
Author: Like I said—I’m not quite sure! [laughs] But I have experimented with this idea—perhaps it’s a new genre I invented, I’m not sure. The first time I consciously did it was with a little short story called “Furniture”. I consciously went into it with the idea that “I’m literally going to write a short story about furniture”—specifically, the furniture of a middle-class suburban apartment.
Millard of Dervish Press: You mean you told the story of the chair, the sofa, the coffeetable…?
Author: Pretty much. I basically attacked the project as layers of description—since a big part of it was avoiding plot and avoiding any narrative in terms of a structure that has an arc and components you could call “dramatic”.
Millard of Dervish Press: So did it work?
Author: In a way, yes. But the overall effect, once the reader takes in the whole thing, is a bit paradoxical.
Millard of Dervish Press: How so?
Author: Well, as I was writing it, trying my darndest to stay on the level of description and not lapse into any kind of narrative that would suck the story into anything resembling a plot, I began to notice myself inadvertently—even, one could say, uncontrollably—infiltrating elements that seemed plot-like: the bare bones or premonitions of a dramatic tension.
Millard of Dervish Press: I can’t imagine furniture having “dramatic tension”…! [laughs]
Author: Well, it shouldn’t! But it kept slipping in! But all seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), I’ll tell you why—I mean, it’s not a mystery once I examined what I was doing more closely. At a certain point in the description, it just seemed natural for me to mention the apartment dweller (or renter)—mainly his absence: how he was absent during my description, which naturally leads to the thought of his return, and when he might return, etc. From there, as much as I tried to “flatten” that aspect—to suffocate the life out of it, so to speak!—I couldn’t help the sheer rhetoric of description leading seamlessly into description of him as well, when he did return to his apartment, the minimal things he’d do on his arrival, etc.
Millard of Dervish Press: So… I’m trying to get a sense here of how it all worked out. Did this fact—this seemingly unavoidable fact—of your almost involuntary introduction of the human into the story, did this ruin it? Or…?
Author: I’d say or.
[mutual silence; author breaks it first with a laugh]
Millard of Dervish Press: Meaning…?
Author: Actually, all this analytical dissection I’m doing gives the mistaken impression that I’m somehow troubled by this story, that somehow it was a failure; but actually, I’m quite happy with it. I just find it amusing that my goal of 100% air-tight plotlessness seems impossible, no matter how hard I tried. But the effect of trying to get there—oh, say, 90% air-tight—I think I succeeded in achieving; and even the imperfect approximation stands out as singularly interesting. If I don’t toot so myself.
Millard of Dervish Press: All right! Cool! Now, as a segue to our main topic, your latest story you’re currently in the process of writing—how far along are you, anyway, if I may interrupt myself to ask…?
Author: I just started last week, in fact. Got about 17 pages down. But like with most of my fiction, I’ve had it in my mind germinating for years—and of course not merely in my mind, but I’d keep a list of words and phrases I felt would fit the ambiance of the story, and that list grew over time—though not as voluminously as the lists of some of my other stories.
Millard of Dervish Press: Such as?
Author: Well, the Olympic Gold Medal winner in that regard was my famously “unmanageable” novel, The Book of Jubilee—which, by the way, I’m still maintaining a list on even now! Even though I definitively finished it years ago! Much smaller list though, naturally.
Millard of Dervish Press: And how long was that novel?
Author: It turned out to be a trilogy with an Epilogue tacked on all amounting to about 1,100 pages (give or take).
Millard of Dervish Press: [whistles through his teeth]
Author: And then for example my story on George Washington—“Uncle George”—which incidentally turned out to be novella-sized, I had an insanely copious list going for years—so copious I had to subdivide the list by categories, and even then it was annoyingly unwieldy. So this current story by comparison had a pretty lightweight list, when it’s all said and done.
Millard of Dervish Press: Okay, what’s this new story about, and how is it an example of that genre of being “about nothing”?
Author: Ah, there’s the rub. This story is more challenging in that regard than my “Furniture” story, since this one—which I call “Spring”—features prominently human characters; largely (if not totally) two: a young man and his aunt (or great aunt).
Millard of Dervish Press: How or why is that more challenging?
Author: Well, I’d say that once you introduce and feature humans in a story, you’re much more tempted to infiltrate things that relate to narrative, plot, dramatic arc—generally speaking, elements of meaning.
Millard of Dervish Press: Aren’t all these elements you speak of, aren’t they all important ingredients of “Art”…?
Author: Indeed, Kimosabe.
Millard of Dervish Press: So are you trying to avoid “Art”…?
Author: Good question. Let us say I’m trying to avoid that one aspect of Art, for sure. And that one aspect is of course important, if not crucial: it seems to be the textural medium by which the artist does his artistic thing: which people still haven’t quite nailed down, but which seems to involve sort of a wrestling match—and/or a love affair—with Life and Reality. That’s one of the major paradoxes involved with Art, of course: Why do we need this critical distance from Life and Reality in order to deal with them? Shouldn’t they be enough by themselves? And of course you can come at this from the other angle and say, well Art is just part of Life and Reality anyway, so there’s not really a paradox per se, etc.
Millard of Dervish Press: Sounds complicated.
Author: Tell me about it! But there’s more! This little project I’ve got going—this new genre, if you will—could itself be a way to smuggle in the enterprise of Art by the back door, so to speak.
Millard of Dervish Press: How would that work?
Author: Well, remember how I said it seems impossible to achieve the 100% air-tight exclusion of all meaning, and how maybe 90% is the best that can be accomplished?
Millard of Dervish Press: Yeah.
Author: Basically that residue, that 10% let’s call it, is expressed—is mediated—through the semantic framework of seeming to be “about nothing” but where really, between the lines, the “something” is being smuggled in. Kind of like the literary form of when a person doesn’t want to show their true feelings, but they end up revealing them anyway in a roundabout way that seems unemotional, conveyed through a flat affect.
Millard of Dervish Press: In acting, they say that style of delivery often can be quite effective.
Author: Yes! And even more so when what’s being delivered is actually a profound trauma or tragedy.
Millard of Dervish Press: But then again, you’re really trying not to do all that, right…?
Author: Yep, that’s my goal. In fact, as I’m writing this, I continue to maintain both a conscious and an intuitive sense of avoidance about it: I don’t want the story to lapse into some ulterior meaning, ultimately one cliché or another. Sure, a great artist can take that tendency and lift it up into something poignantly tender, etc.; but that’s not what I’m after.
Millard of Dervish Press: What are you after…?
Author: [laughs]. Well, like we’ve been saying, that eternally elusive Seinfeldian nothing. But beyond, or aside from, that, with this particular story I always had in the back of my mind this vague sense of what I wanted to convey—but because it was vague at heart, it’s very difficult to realize on paper, or even communicate, like in this interview here.
Millard of Dervish Press: And what’s that…?
Author: Well, it may sound odd or silly, but the only hook I’ve had, as the story has been on the shelf of my mind, so to speak, all these years, is the atmosphere, if you will, of a young man stuck—by his own volition—in an indefinite situation of living with his aunt in her nice suburban home in a state of nursing a perpetual cold in the springtime.
Millard of Dervish Press: That’s it?
Author: [laughs] That’s it! Well, along with this were subtle implications, of the young man—say, in his late 20s or early 30s—wasting his life away by doing this; not to mention what happened to him such that he found it necessary to move in with his aunt… etc. But those are the kinds of obvious elements of “meaning” I have wanted to avoid, and just concentrate on the atmospherics and ambiance of lounging around a pleasantly boring suburban home in the middle of the weekday, watching 70s television day after day, feeling vaguely under the weather all the time, while outside it’s April with its alternations of cherry blossoms in sunny breezes followed the next day by grey skies and spatters of rain…
Millard of Dervish Press: It seems your main intent is based on not much substance, and rather vague at that, as you say…
Author: Yes, as I’m writing I have a constant sense of not having anything to sink my teeth into, mainly because I don’t want to “go there”—which I distract from by preoccupying my literary activity with zeroing in on description—and which, again, is impossible to sanitize from anything hinting of “deeper” issues; though at least I can keep those at bay…
Millard of Dervish Press: It occurs to me that some readers, and some critics, ironically might “find” meaning in your story even though you’re doing your best to avoid it…
Author: That is a distinct possibility! And who knows, if they do find it, it might actually be there, and for one reason or another—probably because I’m so hell-bent on not wanting it to be there!—I can’t see it. But on the other hand, here’s the thing: I don’t want this concern for fidelity to this “new genre” to overwhelm my story-writing process. It’s an important part of the puzzle, sure; but I wouldn’t want it to override the main pleasure I’m getting—sometimes maddeningly frustrated, to be sure, because it’s so nimbly elusive—from weaving it all together.
Millard of Dervish Press: I was going to ask, “have you mapped out” the story, but then realized in this context how silly that is of me…
Author: No, no, not really. In a way I have informally mapped it out, but mostly as I’m writing, I have a sense of open-endedness—which in this case with this story, doesn’t provide much variety or suddenly creative vistas of opportunity. I mean, I’ve got a young guy stuck (for some as yet unexplained reason) in his aunt’s suburban home with a cold. There’s not much I can do with that.
Millard of Dervish Press: And you don’t want to experiment with wildly counter-intuitive scene changes, like you did with your “Nicholas Trant” story…
Author: Oh yeah! That was a wild story! I basically kept writing that (and I might still add on to it, who knows?) in a vein of asking myself, “Okay, what other crazy new scenario do you want to add on to this that has nothing to do with what came before?” Yes, I definitely do not want to indulge that tendency in this story. The very meat and potatoes of “Spring”—to the extent it has any—is precisely a sense of being stuck in sameness, a kind of boring, everyday routine… It would be a species of monstrous cheating to inject wild and crazy variety in this world I’m creating.
Millard of Dervish Press: I imagine though you don’t want to just keep repeating yourself either…? Like Groundhog Day…?
Author: Well, let’s say there’s a level of repetition that I don’t want to do—literally repeating the same sentences describing the same things (my character waking up, doing the same things, going to bed, etc.)—but on the other hand, my peculiar métier here does in fact involve lots of repetition, with variations around the edges. One of the inspirations for this weird genre I’m pursuing has been my realization over time that I find myself really engrossed and entertained by scenes in movies or TV shows where the character is just going through the motions and not really doing anything of great moment—as long as the director has a sure hand, that is, and as long as the banality is not transparently being used to get the audience from A to E in some plot device. It’s when a character is just enjoying a drive in his car, or is just walking down a street and you get a sense that the director is actually relaxing for a change, from that frenetic sense you get, especially with movies & TV shows, where they feel impelled to take the audience on a ride from point A to point Z (the climax). It’s those moments where the director and actors seem to take a break, a mini-vacation, that have seemed to entertain me the most, and I realize I’ve been hungering for that; and I wish some director would extend that more in longer sequences if relaxation from that constant anxiety of having to deliver a plot.
Millard of Dervish Press: Interesting; that kind of reminds me of some scenes from that show Better Call Saul…
Author: Yes! That show is a great example of that; though even there the plot usually and eventually circles back to dominate the proceedings—which is fine, since it’s such an excellent show anyway. A director could take lessons from Better Call Saul, study those “relaxed” scenes where nothing much seems to be going on and yet they captivate the viewer anyway, then maybe dilate them and allow them to breathe for extended periods of time in some new show…
Millard of Dervish Press: Someone might argue that those “relaxed” moments only work because they’re brief and circumscribed, contained within a wider context of more conventionally plot-driven drama…
Author: True; and they might have a point. But I still think it’s worth a try. In fact, though I said earlier my field is not TV or movies, there’s always a first time, and I’ve had on the back burner of my mind for quite a while now an idea for a television show that more ambitiously and with more concerted devotion tries to achieve the Seinfeldian nothing.
Millard of Dervish Press: Oh yeah…?
Author: Yeah. It’s only in the most rudimentary stage, and I haven’t even jotted any notes at all about it.
Millard of Dervish Press: No lists…?
Author: Not even one item, let alone any list! All I’ve got is that it would be a show about a Hispanic cleaning lady—relatively young (maybe early 30s) and attractive, but intelligently attractive, not slutty hot—and she works for a fancy high-rise office building, and maybe, I’m thinking, she’s in charge of other cleaners who are assigned certain floors or wings of the building… I don’t know… I just had this image of her coming to work, very no-nonsense but unfailingly level-headed and nice as a person, just going through her daily motions, with the script and direction and acting exclusively concentrating on what she does and says, however banal it may be—and with long moments of comfortable silence as well—while avoiding any ulterior reason or motive for what she does and says.
Millard of Dervish Press: Sounds interesting.
Author: Yeah, I’ll have to try to get something down on paper one of these days; at least the skeletal framework of a screenplay…
Millard of Dervish Press: Well, good luck with your latest story!
Author: Thanks, I could use some luck!